Civil War historian Emory Thomas is a native of Richmond, Virginia. It's no coincidence, then, that he is known for his work on the Confederacy, including his biographies of Robert E. Lee and Jeb Stuart. However, he has made Athens, Georgia, his home since the late 1960s.
As a football player at UVA, Emory got the history bug after reading C. Vann Woodward. His interest in the southern past took him to graduate school at Rice, where he studied under the prodigious Frank Vandiver. The University of Georgia was his first and only teaching job, and he stayed there for many years.
In part one of this two-part conversation, Dr. Thomas talks about growing up on the Northside of Richmond, grad school, his military service in Ohio, and his landing in Athens.